


Water Offering

by northern



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Minor Character Death, Murder, Parent Death, home made religion, not a healthy way to handle extreme pressure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-30 22:35:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13961505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/northern/pseuds/northern
Summary: When he was small, so little that he was not allowed to go alone down to the sea, every night his mother took him to the trees to pray, in the moonlight.





	Water Offering

**Author's Note:**

> Although this is original, it grew out of a prompt meant for a Hannibal story. I like it as it is, though.
> 
> Thank you so much to damnslippyplanet and elizaria for helping me make the text better.

When he was small, so little that he was not allowed to go alone down to the sea, every night his mother took him to the trees to pray, in the moonlight.

On their part of the land, the island, there were few proper trees. There were many graveled beaches, where people would sometimes collect pieces of amber, sifted by the rolling waves. There were windy ridges where the tall grasses grew, steep footpaths fading into the cliffs on one side of the island. And there were the muddy fields, which his parents worked, along with the adults of the other few households living there.

The trees were in a shielded spot a few minutes' walk from the house, where a ridge curved and formed a rounded hollow, sheltering a few twisted trunks with no leaves, their branches mostly worn away into sand bleached stumps. He liked the way they leaned on each other, even if they sometimes looked unnatural in the darkness. His mother brought him before bed, always. She poured a small glass of wine, if they had it, over the trunks and protruding roots. If there was no wine in the house, she brought beer, or even water if there truly was no finer drink available that night.

"Look, my son," she said. "They drink of what we give them, by the light of the moon."

And he leaned against her solid warmth while she whispered things he never heard, to the trees for safekeeping. The liquid stained their trunks dark and not so bleached and worn the way they looked in daylight.

"Do they like what we give them?" he asked. "Will they give us something in return?"

His mother shushed him, but that night she talked a long time at his bedside with the house silent and dark around them, whispered of how there must always be a gift before prayers, how the trees found nourishment both from soaking up the wine and the whispered praise, and then, only then, he might ask for something. But he must not lose his faith or be angry if what he wanted never came, because sometimes, the trees were wise in withholding, too. And sometimes, even if they gave you what you asked them for, you might not recognize it.

"Mother," he whispered, holding on to her hand in the dark, "what do you ask for? When you pray?"

He couldn't see her smile, but he heard it all the same, in her voice. "I prayed for you," she said. "And then I prayed for another child, so you wouldn't be alone." She guided his hand to her belly, where it was rounded. "It hasn't been very long yet, but I was given what I asked for."

He knew where children came from, but he had never considered that something else might be involved in the begetting – something more than the coming together of bodies.

***

When his mother grew heavier, she took ill. It was hard for her to walk at all, and his father mumbled about summoning a doctor from the mainland while she tried to comfort him from where she lay on the bed, saying that she would be all right, as soon as the babe came. There were no nightly walks to the praying trees, and finally the boy took to going in her stead, bringing only water, because there was nothing else in the house he was allowed to drink. It was cold by the trees, and very dark without his mother, but she was not getting better and the babe would not come, and so he knew he must.

Every night he poured the water from the cup he brought, and whispered to the trees under the moon how beautiful they were, and kind. And then he told them about his mother and their gift to her, and to please let their gift come soon, so she would not be so ill. He had the sinking feeling that he was doing something wrong, that it was not enough, but it was all he could think of to do and he dared not stop.

His mother grew feverish, and weak. "Be a good boy," she whispered to him now in the evenings when he came back from the trees, and "don't forget." His father had taken the boat to the mainland two nights before, and he should have been back by now. Their closest neighbor had been by twice, but the boy had not let her come in. If other people came and saw his mother, they might not leave again, or take him away from her. He had to stay and do what was needed, in secret.

The boy ran errands all day for the adults working in the field. They stopped him and asked about his mother, and his father, but he pretended he could not hear them. His father would come with the doctor eventually – maybe tonight – and then all of this would stop. The new boy, older than him and solidly built, as if he had never gone hungry, shouted at him, but he wouldn't stop for that either, until he heard the words.

"I see you at night!" the new boy called after him.

He stopped, abruptly enough that he almost fell down. The trees were secret. Not even his father came with them to pray, and no one else on the island ever prayed there, that he had seen. He turned around.

"What?" he asked. It was meant to be said casually, but to his horror, his voice came out breathless and worried.

The new boy looked at him, as if he didn't quite know who he was seeing. But that was absurd; here, everyone knew everyone else and all of their moods and miens. Except for the new boy, who had only come to the homestead across the island this autumn, to help the widower there.

"You stand and mumble at the deadwood," the new boy said. "Why do you do that? At night?"

"Deadwood? The trees aren't dead!" he shouted, suddenly panicked.

The new boy was still watching him as if puzzled by something. "What do you mean?" he said. "Of course they're dead. The only reason they haven't been taken for fuel is how twisted and old they are. They must have been there a hundred years. I bet it would be fun to get them burning."

The need to make the new boy stop talking had risen through him while he stood there, but with that last, absurd, _dangerous_ statement, all the boy could do was turn and run, his heart beating in his throat. The new boy shouted after him again but he didn't listen, and didn't stop running again until he was home, shutting the door behind him. Still, he felt as if he were caught in a trap, the urge to run aching within him, but he was already home and there was nowhere to go. He sat down on the floor, curling up against the door with his arms around his knees. His mother moaned in her fevered sleep, but he dared not go to her. He only sat there, waiting for evening to fall.

***

When he approached the trees he knew at once something was wrong. Someone else was there, crouched by their tangled roots, their back to him. His back to him. It was the new boy, hunched over, doing something with his hands.

He put his cup of water down, carefully, and crept closer as quietly as he could, his whole body humming with unhappy tension. When he was just a few feet away, there was a flare of something between the new boy's hands, a short burst of light. A spark.

The boy’s breath caught in his throat with a strange, clicking noise. His cup fell out of his hands, the water meant for offering quickly soaked away by the sandy ground. He knew it was bad, but he could not take his eyes off this thing, this wrongness.

The new boy turned around, sheltering a small flame in his hands, the tiny fire making his face look strange. The trees behind him loomed darkly.

”I waited for you, but I got tired of waiting,” the new boy said, and the words had no meaning. They were just wrong – as wrong as the smile on his face and the flame in his hands. All wrong.

Without the cup, the boy had nothing in his hands. Not his mother’s warm safe hand, nor an offering, and there had only been water for weeks now and he needed _something_ , the trees needed _something_ and it was not this new boy with his fading smile twisted by the shadows. Not him.

”So… are we burning these, then?” the new boy said, his voice wavering.

The boy saw the stone at the same time he decided to move. For the moment it took him to scoop it up, closing his fingers around it, he worried the new boy might run, might get away, but in the stretched out moment it took him to rush forward, to raise his hand, the new boy only opened his mouth a little without speaking, as the dying flame fell out of his slack hands.

He only heard the noises of his own blood and breathing as he brought the stone down on the new boy’s head, that and the striking of the stone into the flesh and the bone as he followed the new boy’s fall to the ground, sat astride him and kept driving the stone down again and again, many times, to make sure. He knew how animals were slaughtered. You needed to make sure.

At last his arm grew tired and the boy noticed how his breath shuddered and there was a noise escaping from his throat, a rhythmic whine that made him stop and listen to the night around him. He felt strange – out of breath and a hotness in his head that made his hands tremble when he released the stone and turned his head this way and that, to find any other strangers trespassing in the place of the trees.

There was nothing. No noise, no light left from the dangerous flame the thing beneath him had brought. The moon wasn’t even in the sky. Only clouds and faint stars. The blood was strong in the air the boy breathed, and he pushed against the body under him, using it to stand up, his legs shaking a little.

The trees were still waiting, dark, bent shapes before him. The offering was spilled, but there was another drink here, and he shouldn’t let the sand swallow it like it had the water.

He could not see the red of the blood on his hands as he stroked the sticky wetness onto the tree trunks, only darkness. It had to be finer than beer, though. Maybe even finer than wine. His voice still trembled as he praised the beauty and power of the trees, but as he whispered his plea for the babe to come and for his mother not to suffer more from it he felt certain that something had happened. He had been heard.

***

They gave him his new sister to hold as they stripped the foul sheets from the bed and took his mother’s corpse away. He was still wet from the cold sea water, his breath shaking with chill, but he tried to warm the baby as best he could so she would not cry so much.

”Your mother will never want for anything, in Heaven,” the doctor told him, patting his damp hair. ”How did you get so wet?”

”I fell in the sea,” he said, clutching his sister closer to stop himself from trembling. His arms were tired from dragging the body of the new boy so far, into the current beyond the rocky promontory, to be washed away, far away. He had done what needed to be done.

”You’ll need to take care of yourself now, for your family. Your father wouldn’t let me take the baby, so he’ll have to depend on you, to care for it. Are you up for it, boy?”

He nodded, unable to say anything. Neither the doctor nor his father would be able to take his sister from him. He would feed her and raise her and teach her about everything important. How to always be grateful. The trees had given her to him and stopped his mother’s suffering, even though it was not in the way he had wanted. Sometimes the way the trees did things was different, but his offering had been enough and they had heard him and given him what he had asked for. He would never let her go.


End file.
